This is not a problem anymore. This was fixed a few days ago. The only problem now is you can not spend AP if you got the fishing pole after pre-patch because it is no longer an artifact so you can’t interact with the pearl that unlocks the AP tree for the Underlight angler. Also because it is not held you can not put some baits on a fishing pole. Nat’s hat for example is useless atm because of this.
I know for a fact this has been reported quite a lot and they feel no need to fix it. Look for this to make it well past launch.